Deep Secret

The blurb:

The Barnes family has lived in one tiny village for generations.

Twins Madeline and Grace, their cousin Elspeth, Colin and Oliver, old Aunt Susan – all there forever, in a place barely touched by time.

The twins have a secret. So does Aunt Susan.

Secrets are everywhere in this place.

But nothing is forever – people die, and even the most beautiful places have to change.

However deep the secret, you have to tell somebody sometime...

The story is set in a small village that lies at the bottom of a valley. They are a community lost in time. The men and women fill stereotypical roles and young people are expected to find love, marry, and settle down.

Twins Medline and Grace share an unbreakable bond. They are so alike even their mother occasionally mistakes one for the other. When tragedy strikes the town is beside itself with grief. This is compounded with news that the valley is to be flooded and turned into a reservoir. These two incidents shake the town to a point where its secrets start spilling out.

It’s not hard to see why Berlie Doherty has won the Carnegie Medal twice. Deep Secret is filled with sentences that could be straight from the lines of a poem. It’s a deeply moving book with characters that are rich and alive. You feel a sense of community, like you are a part of their town, and want to fight alongside them. The flooding of the village is taken from the true story of the creation of the Ladybower Reservoir. Doherty was fascinated by the  destruction of a town, and with it, the history of its inhabitants.

This is a hard book to review without giving anything away (there is a big ‘wow I didn’t see that coming moment’ quite early on), so I will just say that Doherty explores identity in a very interesting way. The story looks at the identity of individuals and of the village as a whole. Madeline and Grace are characters that you fall in love with and it’s fascinating to look inside the bond only twins can share.

My only criticism is that I think it went on a little too long. I didn’t mind the length of the actual book but more the time span. I felt I was starting to tire of the characters a little and felt the pace had slowed. I enjoyed the first two thirds the most. In saying that, this is really only a small criticism, and I love this book so much I finished it in two days.

4/5